Popular culture(extra)

Popular culture and the mass miedia

 Owing to the pervasive and increasingly interconnected nature of popular culture, especially its intermingling of complementary distribution sources, some cultural anthropologists, literary, and cultural critics have identified a large amount of intertextuality in popular culture's portrayals of itself. The commentary on the intertextuality and its self-referential nature has itself become the subject of self-referential and recursive commentary.

 Many cultural critics have dismissed this as merely a symptom or side-effect of mass consumerism however, alternate explanations and critique have also been offered. It reflects a fundamental paradox. The increase in technological and cultural sophistication, combined with an increase in superficiality and dehumanization.

 According to television studies scholars specializing in quality television, such as Kristin Thompson, self-referentiality in mainstream American television (especially comedy) reflects and exemplifies the type of progression characterized previously. Extreme examples approach a kind of thematic infinite regress wherein distinctions between art and life, commerce and critique, ridicule and homage become intractably blurred.